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"We didn't know what we were coming into and we had a salon near Brighton but he got in touch and said 'sell the business as quick as you can', so that is what I did."

Mrs More arrived in New Zealand in March 1954, after a six-week voyage by boat.

The couple made their home in the Bay of Plenty in 1961 and opened up a hair salon on Bureta Rd, Otumoetai, which they owned for six years.

The couple went back and forth to the Northern Hemisphere for 30-odd years before spending six months in their native homeland to decide where they would live out the rest of their days.

They chose New Zealand.

Mrs More's husband died in 1985.

"He was on the roof one minute and in the hospital the next. Just two hours and he was gone, with a heart attack there was no saving him.

"After his death, I just thought life goes on. I've still got to go travelling, I have still got to move."

She went back to the UK for six years, but having been away from her birthplace for so long she did not feel at home anymore.

"I said to my sisters, 'I am going back to New Zealand'. They wanted to know why and I said 'I have got more friends in New Zealand than I have in England', because I didn't see them [friends in England] anymore than I would hear from them in letters."

Mrs More said there was no secret to her long life. Her eldest sister, Dafine, lived until she was 106. "I've just lived and enjoyed everything."

She said she always ate "good, sensible food" and travel kept her mind active. She had been living in New Zealand, by herself and still independently, for 22 years.